
Ep 95 | Inflation, Interest Rates, and Productivity | A Conversation with Kenneth Rogoff
The Money Movement with Jeremy Allaire | Leaders in Blockchain, Crypto, DeFi & Financial Inclusion
National Security, Economics, and Alternative Infrastructures
This chapter explores the national security and economic dimensions of alternative infrastructures in relation to currency competition. The discussion also delves into the interaction between cyber risks and the global internet system, highlighting the role of cryptography in addressing these risks. The speaker emphasizes that blockchain technology is a critical piece in creating a secure and interoperable infrastructure layer for economic interactions over the internet.
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Speaker 1
It's another tradable card game. I remember someone on YouTube basically said like comparing like magic or horse stone, which is another similar game to Yu-Gi-Oh, is like comparing apples to machine guns. Because there's like no, there's like very little limitation on what cards you can actually play from your hand in one turn. But you have this kind of crazy, and you have this kind of like very different environment. But to me, the similar thing between the two is like you have these very well-defined lanes of experimentation. And those lanes of experimentation aren't easy. They're still quite difficult. But it's kind of like transparent. It's kind of like transparent that like you have to get good at that. You have to like, in the end, you have to like reduce your opponent's life totals to zero, right? That's how you win the game. Whereas these like other things, it's like they're layers of these rules, and the rules aren't the rules that you think they are. They're not the rules that are written out there. And that kind of maybe a bit more, maybe a bit more, defiance or like quote unquote heterodox as much as that term is overused. That's kind of testing for something a bit different. Do you agree? What kind of correlation do you think there is between the two? So first, I just want to note that like, I wouldn't say it was the difference with a machine, apple and a machine gun. I'd say it's more like a Rolex watch and a $5 knockoff you bought on Canalski that falls apart five minutes later. Yeah, you can like that's very good. I mean, it's trying to sort of be a palmentation of this thing, but then it's heavily advertised on cart with cartoons so people buy it anyway. So it works out. But shade aside, I do think that certain tasks and magic provide very strong filters. But I also want to point out that the question presumes that agency is a given that like this person has agency that like, you know, you have a 610 for agency and I have a seven out of 10 for agency and she has a nine. So she has agency. And I don't think it's like that at all. Right. I think that as we go for life, we learn to have agency or we learn to not have agency. We develop the skill of having agency. We learn how to have agency. We learn how to have agency effectively and that like how you're raised and how you go through life and what you encounter very much impacts that. So I don't think that when the players of magic who did well first encountered the game, they necessarily had tons and tons of agency. But I do think that the players who succeed at the highest levels come out of that with a lot of agency. I think that it's impossible to succeed as a top level magic player without that kind of agency. I think as being a streamer these days, it means you have to get in that chair and you have to play that game and you have to be on not just when you feel like it. You have to be on for like, you know, ideally 40 plus hours a week, always at the same time, always engaging with the audience, always being positive, always being interesting. And there's nobody enforcing like discipline on you. You have to do it for yourself. And similarly back in the day, it wasn't a career visible, but instead we had to test and develop our own decks. We had to be the research and development department. We had to run experiments. We had to do deliberate practice. We had to learn from our mistakes. We had to figure out all these different patterns. We had to learn to develop teams to work together, to make the teams appropriate to the tasks in hand so that we were all working towards same goals and when it no longer made sense, you had to find a new team. You had to make sure that like you proved the people who weren't doing their fair share or weren't good enough. You had to like seek out better groups. If you were the person who was like out growing your current group, you had to learn to get along with a wide variety of other people who were doing all these things. You had to learn to work together in some sense, like all the magic players at the top would talk to each other and be friends and work both to make the game a better place and to make each other better at magic. Right. That's actually very interesting. So the team dynamic was very important in magic, especially like, is that still true now? Less, much less.
Kenneth Rogoff is Maurits C. Boas Professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at the IMF. His influential 2009 book co-authored with Carmen Reinhart, “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” shows the quantitative similarities across time and countries in the roots and aftermath of debt and financial crises. His 2016 book “The Curse of Cash” explores the past, present, and future of currency. He has long ranked among the top dozen most cited economists, and is an international grandmaster of chess.
At the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Professor Rogoff joined Circle Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO Jeremy Allaire for a wide-ranging conversation about the nexus of economics, technology, and policy.
In their Money Movement conversation, Jeremy and Kenneth covered:
👉2:02 – Interest rate trends
👉6:56 – China’s currency
👉10:40 – Modern monetary theory
👉13:11 – Radical tech disruption
👉26:14 – CBDCs and surveillance
If you’re interested in learning more about currency and macroeconomic trends, tune in to this episode of The Money Movement.
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